Book Published in 1640 Sets a Record at Auction

Video

A Puritan book of psalms printed in 1640 sold for more than $14 million at Sotheby's in New York Tuesday, a new record for a book. It will go on display in libraries across the United States.CreditCreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

It already held a record as the first book printed in English in North America. Now it holds two: It is also the most expensive book ever sold at auction.

The little volume of psalms, one of only 11 known to exist out of roughly 1,700 printed by 17th-century Puritans in Massachusetts, went for $14,165,000 at auction on Tuesday.

The buyer of the Bay Psalm Book, as it is known, was David M. Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, an investment firm in Washington. Mr. Rubenstein has bought a number of historical documents in recent years, including a copy of Magna Carta for $21 million in 2007 (or $23.7 million today, adjusted for inflation).

He placed his bid by telephone from Australia and told the auctioneer, David N. Redden of Sotheby’s, that he planned to lend it to libraries across the country to display, eventually arranging a long-term loan to one of them.

“His intention is not to take these kinds of objects home,” Mr. Redden said.

The price, which included the auction house’s premium, set a record for a book sold at auction, beating the $11.54 million paid in 2010 for a copy of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” (equivalent to $12.39 million today).

The Bay Psalm Book was published in 1640, more than a century and a half after the first Gutenberg Bibles and 20 years after the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth. It was the first book turned out by a printing press that had been shipped over from England. The press operator was a locksmith who was apparently learning as he went along: some of the pages were bound in the wrong order. At the bottom of one, someone wrote, “Turn back a leaf.”

Image

The Bay Psalm Book is among the first printed in America.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“It’s one of those things where there are 11 known copies, so it’s one of the holy grails for book collectors,” Michael Inman, the curator of rare books at the New York Public Library, said this month. (The library owns one of the 10 other copies. It sold at Sotheby’s in London in 1855 for 19 shillings, which Mr. Inman estimated was 1,900 British pounds or about $3,075.)

The Puritans, who disdained the King James Version of the Bible, retranslated the psalms from Hebrew. They meant their translations to be sung a cappella — at church or at home.

The copy that was sold on Tuesday had belonged to Boston’s Old South Church. Over the years, its congregation has included Samuel Adams, the colonial patriot who was a cousin of President John Adams, and Elizabeth Vergoose, a printer’s wife who is thought to be the Mother Goose of the nursery rhymes. Its ministers included Thomas Prince, the grandson of the last governor of Plymouth Colony.

Prince was also a book collector who stashed his collection in the nooks and crannies of the church. His New-England-Library, as he called it, apparently included two copies of the Bay Psalm Book, according to Sotheby’s (whose curators question whether he managed to acquire five, as some accounts say). The church sent both copies to the Boston Public Library for safekeeping in 1866; the other copy is not being sold.

The congregation voted last year to sell one copy to pay for ministries and repairs to the church’s 1875 building. The church’s historian, a longtime member of the congregation, resigned his post to protest the sale, and a successor was named.

Although the volume of psalms did not draw the pre-sale estimate of $15 million to $30 million, the church’s senior minister, the Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor, said she was “thrilled with that price.”

“We couldn’t be happier with the buyer, we couldn’t be happier with the amount,” she said. “This is amazing. A year ago, we were wondering if we could get $5 million for it. We didn’t know.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Book of Psalms Published in 1640 Makes Record Sale at Auction. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe